This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

If you need a reason to praise Ontario’s new sex education curriculum, type “porn” into Google and click on the first search result. (Don’t do this.) Grade 1 students — we’ll call them “Liam and Emma” — could do it just for fun. By Grade 2, they could also click on the site’s “Random” link and “GIF generator,” which I just did and I advise against it.

I embark on this column cautiously, having had an editor, a nice gentle person, query my using “masturbate” in a column recently. It made him feel squeamish, he said. What he, Liam and/or Emma will make of the butcher’s shop window offered by Google, I am unsure. Perhaps there will be a group faint.

People used to be silent about sex, which left them terrorized and vulnerable. In 1946, the Toronto Star reported that Ontario high school students were being taught this: “Any sex relationship outside of healthy marriage is dangerous, and constitutes a risk of venereal disease infection.” It did not go on to say: “Therefore use a condom.”

At that point, Emma and Liam may already have done the sex and drawn their own happy conclusions. But in the era of the candid memoir, we learn that trauma and confusion are the result of not being told, explicitly, what sex is and means. Raw autobiography is the best guide to how people really lived in their era, and the verdict on how one was handled sexually is often a shout of pain.

Article Continued Below

Girls are still raised to be polite and helpful, and to take responsibility for the tone of any social encounter. This puts them at a disadvantage in sexual situations and is often why they don’t say no. It’s the verbal discomfort. The memoirist Merrill Markoe has described being raped by a man she calls “Internationally Famous Art Professor.” “I knew I was supposed to find this pleasurable,” she wrote. “Since I didn’t I tried to turn up the corners of my mouth and arranged my face accordingly.”

Markoe wonders in retrospect at her sense of duty. “That’s why the modern day horror stories about teenage girls and their sexting and hooking-up activities don’t surprise me. The only thing that girls are doing now that is demonstrably worse than what I did at their age is starting younger.”

In the London Review of Books, Jenny Diski describes her own rape at age 14. She writes, “I was neither dazzled nor drugged into sex when I was 14 – I was embarrassed into it.” That’s why girls go into rooms that hold danger; they can’t quite believe what might happen.

If Emmas have problems, so do Liams. The novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard writes that he had not masturbated by age 18 and suffered miseries over premature ejaculation. It’s good for Liams to read about Knausgaard’s confusion and despair. “I did this so you don’t have to” is the subterranean message of such memoirs.

I do love the Brit sitcom, The Inbetweeners, about four beautifully stupid adolescent boys but it is a festival of sexual humiliation and bullying, which fits with the idea that true comedy is about human pain. I also love Broad City, Comedy Central’s terrific sitcom — produced by Amy Poehler and now in its second season — about two young women in New York, which is wonderfully sexually filthy.

I do like a bit of filth. Some sex educators have complained that the Ontario curriculum emphasizes the dangers of sex rather than the pleasure. But could anything be more revolting for a teenager than to watch the Healthy Living teacher droning on about two people in love doing a very special thing together? Sex is shocking, which is what makes it attractive.

I can’t describe Broad City in this paper. It’s too funny and we’ll get complaint letters. Just as the girls in Girls don’t realize when they’re the villains of the piece, Abbi and Ilana don’t quite understand what is sexually normal (and what they think is an average reaction to painkillers combined with a weed smoothie).

Broad City describes how young people think. They are incautious but with a larger landscape for online disaster than the previous generation had.

Sex education cannot keep up with the times, and it shouldn’t. Teachers telling little Emma and Liam about the risks are merely setting a stage for a world of pleasure to come.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com